Borderline

Susan J Cohen is an American immigration lawyer who has seen the last few decades of US immigration policy. She talks about the situation Joe Biden has inherited, after Donald Trump changed more than 400 immigration laws, rules and processes; why a record number of arrests has been made at the US Southern border; what is happening in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala or Haiti that is making people move north; and what the impact of the Trump presidency has been on immigrants, lawyers and activists.

Cohen is the founding partner of the immigration law practice at Boston firm Mintz, an author and a songwriter. In 2017 she was part of a small band of legal minds who fought the so-called "Muslim ban" in court and won a short-lived victory.

📚 Journeys from There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs and Contributions. Susan J Cohen, with Steven Taylor. River Grove Books, 2021. Buy it here. (This affiliate link supports Borderline.)
🎶 Beyond the Borders and Looking for the Angels, written by Susan Cohen and performed by students and alumni of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachussetts.

Show notes
[00:00:16] Intro
[00:01:32] The immigration situation Joe Biden inherited
[00:05:21] Title 42 and Remain in Mexico: How the US keeps lawful asylum-seekers at bay
[00:08:49] What it's like to wait at the US Southern border
[00:12:43] A historical record for arrests at the Southern border
[00:15:13] What's happening in Central America and Haiti to push people north
[00:18:42] The massive problems we'd need to solve to stem migration flows
[00:22:27] Patterns of discrimination and aggression at the border
[00:26:58] How the American public feels about immigration
[00:29:46] Changing the perception of immigrants

Refugees are modern Scheherazades. They trade their story for another chance at life. The sultan is an indifferent asylum officer behind her desk, a well-meaning charity worker or a hostile native citizen. But so much truth goes untold.

The exhausting expectations of gratitude, the long wait that douses your inner fire, the battle for dignity and the big impact of small acts... Iranian American novelist Dina Nayeri lifts the veil in The Ungrateful Refugee, her first memoir, weaving her personal story with reporting in Greek refugee camps.

02:18 Why she made the move from fiction to nonfiction

05:07 How the refugee experience has changed from the 80s

07:30 A culture of disbelief in immigration offices

09:54 When refugees become storytellers to security guards

14:18 How culture changes storytelling

17:21 What you lose when you wait

21:51 How womanhood and refuge interplay

24:19 Why do we make a difference between political refugees and economic migrants?

26:46 Stop asking what refugees can do for us

28:45 Why dignity matters

31:21 What are we entitled to as human beings? Why aren't others?

33:16 Rawls' original position and American exceptionalism

36:54 The US president changed, not the system

38:53 What individuals can do to help

40:19 Gratitude is private

44:09 Political engagement is assimilation

46:17 Outro

📚 The Ungrateful Refugee, by Dina Nayeri. Canongate, 2020. Find it here.

👀 The ungrateful refugee: ‘We have no debt to repay.’ By Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. 2017.

📸 Anna Leader

Selda Shamloo is taking the Home Office to court. Her mother, who’s Iranian, has been repeatedly denied a simple tourist visa to visit her. This is life on an ostracized passport.

For many of us, our passport is a symbol of our wanderlust, a badge of our freedom. It’s been gathering dust for the past year and we can’t wait to get it out. But if you’re Iranian or from any other country at the bottom of the passport power rankings, pandemic or not, it won’t get you anywhere. The Passport Index ranks Iran 193rd, ahead of just Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Only four countries let Iranians in without visas at the moment, and those who require them, often simply don’t grant them. For ordinary families caught in the politics, it can mean years of anguish and administrative complications simply to spend a few days together. Shirin Shamloo hasn’t been allowed to set foot in the UK, where her daughter is a citizen, since 2007. And she can’t see why.

00:00 Intro

01:36 A Tehran childhood

05:22 Leaving Iran and becoming British

09:37 A father’s visit to London

13:09 How to become a Borderline member

14:10 The first visa rejection

18:45 Reapply at your own risk

21:06 Taking the Home Office to court

29:50 The emotional impact of family separation

34:13 "Going back to Iran would be a second immigration"

36:26 "A lot more people can understand my story now."

👀 Read the full transcript at borderlinepod.com
🎧 Related episode: Colin Yeo on the UK’s hostile environment policy
🎶 Music by Ofshane

When they narrowly escaped the Third Reich and found refuge in Britain, Peter Gumbel’s parents and grandparents cast off their German Jewish heritage to become a perfectly British family. Cricket, Marmite and Church of England. Two generations later, deeply unsettled by Brexit, Gumbel reaches out to Germany again in search of a new passport – and a reckoning with history.

In conversation with Isabelle Roughol, Gumbel explores the fragility of identity and who we still are when we can no longer recognize the nations we call home. It’s the story of one family and the story of Europe.

Show notes:

00:00 Intro

01:47 "Home is where I am"

03:14 From the Third Reich to Cool Britannia
06:35 How Brexit tore through his identity

07:56 Choosing a new passport

11:21 Coming to terms with a German Jewish heritage

15:10 How identity diverges within a single family

17:09 Reconnecting (or not) with a Jewish identity

22:57 How to become a Borderline member

24:06 His relationship with Britain since Brexit

29:26 Could this all happen again?

32:08 Outro

Sources:

Citizens of Everywhere: Searching for Identity in the Age of Brexit, by Peter Gumbel. Haus Publishing, London, 2020.

📬 Read, join & support on Substack | 🍎 Listen on Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Listen on Spotify | 📺 Watch on YouTube | ⭐️ Support on Patreon | 🌍 borderlinepod.com

The UK is reopening, but not transnational families. Visiting friends or relatives abroad is the second most frequent reason for foreign travel. It's about one in four trips out of the UK, twice the volume of business travel. Travel restrictions have reduced these trips to a trickle. For millions who love across borders, spending time together has been impossible for most of the past year. Even illegal.

Yet, media coverage of travel restrictions has had a near pathological focus on foreign holidays. This week, we hear the voices of those who wait, still, to reunite.

With Arietta Deick, Mary Wooldridge Eligu, Jane Copland and Marion Specker 🇬🇧 🇭🇷 🇨🇭 🇺🇸 🇺🇬 🇳🇿

#LoveIsNotTourism

Show notes

00:00 Intro
04:03 Arietta Deick
06:04 Marion Specker
07:08 Mary Wooldridge Eligu
15:22 Jane Copland
20:03 Outro

👀 International travel restrictions stop more than just holidays. My op-ed in The Independent.
🇳🇿 Our Side of the Clouds. Jane Copland for Entropy magazine, about the tensions between New Zealanders and their expats.